No senator gets more money from banks than does Heidi Heitkamp, D-N.D., and no senator fights harder for taxpayer subsidies for banks than does Heidi Heitkamp.
With the numbers now public from the first quarter of 2018, Heitkamp is the league leader in campaign cash from commercial banks according to the Center for Responsive Politics. That’s not surprising, considering she’s a vulnerable Democrat who sits on the Banking Committee. It also helps explain the ferocity with which she defends the Export-Import Bank, a federal agency that subsidizes U.S. exports by giving taxpayer-backed guarantees to big banks when they finance foreign buyers of U.S. goods.
Heitkamp’s top source of campaign cash is Goldman Sachs, and she is the No. 1 senator at getting Goldman cash. Ex-Im has regularly subsidized Goldman, and Goldman has lobbied on Ex-Im. When Goldman lends money to Norweigian Air, for instance, Ex-Im guarantees the loan in order to subsidize the airline’s Boeing purchase. Once Boeing was the subsidized exporter (back when Goldman owned Hawker Beechcraft and Ex-Im subsidized Hawker’s sale of corporate jets to a state-owned Chinese Bank).
Heitkamp is also the top recipient in the whole country of donations from General Electric (that is, from GE’s PAC, employees, and executives). GE is a fierce advocate for — and a top beneficiary of — Ex-Im subsidies, as both a subsidized lender and a subsidized exporter.
So this helps explain why when Heitkamp got President Trump’s ear, the one thing she said was: get Ex-Im subsidies flowing at full speed.
Margaret Hartman reported on Heitkamp’s account of their meeting:
“He says, ‘You should switch parties,’ ” Heitkamp said. She responded with an ask of her own.
“I said, ‘You should give me an Ex-Im bank,’ ” the senator said, with a chuckle. It was a reference to the Export-Import Bank, an agency she was pushing to make fully operational.
So the favorite senator of Goldman Sachs, General Electric, and the banking industry in general has made Export-Import Bank her priority. That tells you something, both about the agency, and about the gentlelady from North Dakota
